I put dual boot ubuntu 10.10 on this here laptop ab out a month ago and was really blown away at how fast it is. I am quite impressed at how well it works and how easy it is to use. It's a really huge improvement on the 9.xxx series. But, then most of you Linux guys already know this.

I have been using Ubuntu for a few years now, and have completely ditched Windows for personal use. I still have to use it at work and here at the station, however i am thinking of making my engineering PC dual-boot.

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

I have CentOS running on an old laptop. It seems to have better driver support for that laptop than any other flavor of Linux I've tried. It found my broadcom wireless card *AND* installed drivers for it with no intervention. I had to use ndis and b43fwcutter and all sorts of crap to get Ubuntu running on that laptop...sort of...when it wanted to work. Oh and it uh...lost the WiFi after like 15 minutes and required a reboot to get back.

I was using Ubuntu, but got totally fatigued with the constant updates and switched over to Fedora. I find it a bit easier to use, and as you know, old geeks tend to get stuck in their ways of doing things. Change ain't necessarily for the better. Unless, it comes with freebies, like coffee, lunch, etc.

Actually Ubuntu 10.10 was pretty nice.

Fedora is working very nicely, and there isn't too much of a learning curve with it. Updates are seldom, and only when really necessary.

Distributions with rapid update cycles tend to be safer, but aren't something you'd necessarily want to use on production machines (production in the IT sense, rather than the broadcast sense :-), or if you have a really large universe of machines to work on.

My business has been business servers and support for 20 years, and that's the lens through which I select a distro; SuSE, even now that Novell isn't running things, hits closest to that for me, for a "full service" distribution.

For more stripped down machines -- purposebuilt service servers -- I lean to CentOS 5 and 6; great for that, but not what I'd want to run on a workstation.

SuSE will *run* servers, mind you, it can just be a bit more heavyweight, and sometimes you don't want that.

While I am a fan of Ubuntu, I am not overly impressed with the recent changes they are making to the default desktop environment. I am curious to see what the new one looks like. I may have to see if I have a spare box to throw a recent copy on. I usually stick to the LTS releases on my regular use machines.

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Update. Switched the old laptop to Fedora Core. CentOS is nice, but being a business oriented OS, lacks some of the new versions of apps. Also... Tried the latest Ubuntu just for fun... Same issue... Fedora finds the Broadcom wireless card just fine, Ubuntu doesn't even detect a card is installed.